"Although Biden says he won't decide whether to run for President until after the midterm elections, he already faces a predicament that is all but unprecedented in modern American politics; in the past half century, every sitting Vice-President who sought the Presidency won his party's nomination. Biden, however, trails Hillary Clinton by margins of fifty points or more. If she does not run, or if she stumbles, Biden could step in. For the moment, though, he is in limbo—finding ways to stay in the picture, help his President, and burnish his legacy."

Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko shakes hands with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden during their meeting in Kiev June 7, 2014. (Photo: Valentyn Ogirenko/Courtesy Reuters)

"The capture of Iraqi territory by Islamic extremists, barely two years since the last American soldiers left, prompted an extraordinary wave of soul-searching in Iraq and the United States, which lost more than thirteen hundred men and women in Anbar Province. Much of that reflection, in both countries, centered on Maliki, the man in whom the United States invested so much of its hopes and resources. Among many Iraqis, the concern is that their country is falling again into civil war, and that it is Maliki who has driven it to the edge."

"However marginal and remote Mali may seem to Westerners, its travails exemplify the security problems posed by neglected places in the age of Islamist terror. With little effort, criminal and terrorist groups can seize countries, or parts of them—just as narcotraffickers have effectively taken over West African states like Guinea Bissau. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Islamist cause has grown more popular, and tensions have risen throughout the Maghreb, the northwestern region of North Africa. In 2006, a franchise of Al Qaeda formed in the area, calling itself Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). It originated in the nineteen-nineties, in Algeria, where a decade-long Islamist insurgency was crushed at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. That confrontation left behind bitter memories and a core group of survivors, who gained further expertise in Iraq and Afghanistan and new adherents throughout the region."

"Rodrigo Rosenberg knew that he was about to die. It wasn't because he was approaching old age—he was only forty-eight. Nor had he been diagnosed with a fatal illness; an avid bike rider, he was in perfect health. Rather, Rosenberg, a highly respected corporate attorney in Guatemala, was certain that he was going to be assassinated."

"The outlet that conveyed the greatest sense of equipoise, even optimism [about the 2011 Egyptian uprising], was Haaretz ("The Land"), a broadsheet daily that is easily the most liberal newspaper in Israel and arguably the most important liberal institution in a country that has moved inexorably to the right in the past decade. The Schocken family, which has owned the paper since 1935, is not commandingly wealthy, yet it invests lavishly in the quality of a paper that is authoritative in its news columns, left-wing in its ideology, and insistently oppositional in its temper."